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How I plan to spend the offseason

This year’s American soccer season isn’t scheduled to end for a few weeks yet*, but my preparations for the off season have already started. Usually, the months between MLS Cup and the beginning of training camp are spent doing player scouting and filling in gaps in my data set. This year, however, I have something more ambitious planned.

I’m hoping to re-write my toolset in Python.

The project, currently named Trapp, will replace a set of legacy scripts that stretches back more than ten years. It includes a set of tools for importing, compiling, analyzing, and rendering soccer data. Languages include VBscript, Processing, PHP, Python, and R.

Not everything will be replaced – and certainly not all at once. My immediate goal is to be able to retire the VBscript components, which are simultaneously the heart of my infrastructure and written in a language that was declared finished in 2007, and dead last May.

I write about this here as a way of gauging community interest in this project. Is anyone else interested in the code I’m writing? While this will be an open source project in that the code is available on GitHub, I may be a little more vocal about my progress if people are interested in using it themselves.

Ongoing updates about how Trapp evolves will be posted somewhere, either to this blog (if demand exists) or to my personal blog if the soccer community seems less interested.

* Somewhat surprisingly, Columbus is even still in contention for MLS Cup. Even more surprisingly, they could end up hosting if Sunday’s playoffs continue as expected.